A Day at the Ballpark

My senior project has been with Eric Wenz at Progressive Field with the Cleveland Indians. We are shadowing Mrs. Nancy Schneider who is Associate Director of the Merchandising Offices. Our goal was to learn the business world behind the team that takes the field every night.

Our first two days at Progressive were slower than the rest of the week as we were getting familiar with the operations and as the Indians were playing at 7:05 and Eric and I had to be back at school for baseball games. One thing we did learn from these two days despite the pace was the time spent before the game in preparation for the game. At 10:30 am, there were already four members of the merchandising office present working on what they call "Game Day Notes" which includes the expected sales plan for every souvenir stand.

Wednesday was a very interesting day because The Tribe played at 12:05, and Eric and I could stay due to no baseball practice. We prepared the game day notes, and set up program stands outside the gates and sold programs until the game began. This experience was surprising to see how many people actually bought programs compared to how much money we were expected to make from our sales plan. Eric and I were able to make $43 over our sales plan. Then we worked in separate souvenir stands for the rest of the game and I was surprised about how little business they attracted. With a struggling team, the resulting ticket sales and merchandising sales suffer also. It is sad to see this, as the stadium was so alive as I remember it in the 90s.

Thursday and Friday were my favorite days as we working in the Distribution Center. In this center we dealt with the incoming boxes of merchandise to be received. We would take the order form, which had the list of all the items that were supposed to be in the boxes to which the order form was taped. We would open up the boxes and check the numbers and the prices and bar code numbers on the items and make sure that all the numbers matched up. If there was a problem with the numbers not matching up then we would fill out an audit form for the difference.

Overall, I was very surprised by the number of people that were needed to make the stadium move smoothly every game. The number of boxes in the Distribution Center also surprised me. Eric and I would finish an order and then another pallet of about 7 orders would be moved down toward us. Hopefully we will get to see more players as on Tuesday I saw Shin-Soo Choo! Hope everyone else is having a good project!

John Wilson